Creeping Blogthetics

Self-plug: you can find my byline in the following things (not online) - this month's Wire, interviewing this person and reviewing this book; and the current issue of Blueprint, on Paul Overy's excellent Light Air and Openness. In the latter there's also a potentially intriguing pledge to resist British architecture's current trough (well anatomised here) from one of these people, who make the rather surprising claim that architecture today suffers from being too ethical, denouncing diktats from 'lobby groups, think-tanks and central government'. Who is missing from this list, I wonder...?

A Nation of Shedkeepers

You see some odd things on the London to Manchester train. Gigantic cooling towers in the countryside, a mutant variant on Kropotkin's 'factory in the garden'; silos and mounds, canals of a decidedly Enlightened obsessive straightness. The one built artifact that seems to dominate the landscape, however, is the shed. Victorian sheds, their iron roofs stretching out for half a mile; post-war sheds, tinny and shoddy; and the gigantic sheds of the last 20 years, utterly enormous, featureless buildings seeming to enclose small towns within their plasticky walls. The late, great Martin Pawley predicted in the 1998 book Terminal Architecture that the architecture of the future would most likely be a variant on the gigantic sheds of big box retail - automated, easily built and recycled, ephemeral, non-architectural, a super-functionalism. 'Walmartopolis'. The landscape I saw would suggest that he was most certainly right here, if wrong elsewhere (e.g, on the end of tall buildings in London). Yet one can't help wishing that the architecture of future wasn't quite so drab.



Even the overwhelming scale is only appreciable from the air, so even the an awed response to the sublime power of the corporate juggernaut is nigh-impossible. Sure, you can admire the total technological efficiency of these structures, and agree with Pawley that they make a mockery of the 'sustainable', over-budget concoctions of the starchitect - but surely this final morphing of utilitarianism is one of the greatest pieces of evidence for J.G Ballard's admonition: the future will be boring. Therefore, no sheds for you to look at here. Instead, here's more evidence of the extremely bizarre spaces that lie not very far from the mundanism of this landscape, found via Unmitigated England. Look at these two photographs and wonder at exactly what sort of ludicrous, morbidly fascinating landscape we've created for ourselves. The first one (top of post) depicts 'acoustic mirrors' in Kent, 30ft concrete structures with built-in microphones, an early form of radar, the poignancy of obsolete high-technology, of futurist relics; the second, which you see above (surely built near to several large sheds, this one) depicts a seemingly wholly identikit Barratt landscape, distinguished by the art deco tower of a 1930s mental hospital. Care in the community.

Organising Resentment

Savonarola, excellent, on the atrophy of the Italian left - put down to their inability to mobilise popular discontent, or respond to drab bread & butter issues like housing, working conditions, etc: limiting its concerns instead to 'the cultural and international' (sound familiar?). Rather, what it has to do if it is to fight a resurgent populist neo-fascism, is 'organise resentment'*. When myself and Mark were advocating resentment as a political category, it was notable how many people got extremely uppity, as if anger, rage, the occasional bit of schadenfreude, were somehow something the other does, but we should know better. It has long been a cliche of rightists and liberals that socialists are all guilty bourgeoises: it's far from the whole truth, and always has been - in fact, what gave the workers' movement its power was always the (precarious) unity of proletarian self-organisation and the totalised conception of society and the economy which only education (autodidactic or otherwise) can provide; but nevertheless - if the left is film festivals, Richard Meier buildings, opposition to war and little else, then it can hardly be surprised if the Right steals its natural constituency. The results of this could be grim indeed.

* Which would not, incidentally, be referring to New Labour in Crewe: anti-immigration rhetoric and inverted snobbery (let's not forget, this is the Party that is 'intensely comfortable with people getting very rich') in place of what was once social democracy.

'At the heart of daily punishment and sufferings, in the very wheels of encroaching mediocrity, are found both the keys and the doors to inner worlds'

This passed me by, but is very apposite to recent book-as-portal discussion: Jon Savage, last week, on Ian Curtis' reading habits, and W-C intellectuals in postpunk; the general unashamed bookishness that was not far from the norm before the setting in of the war against intelligence.

Picture-Thinking Meme

Like IT, I refuse to call this meme 'passion quilt' - but I will certainly participate in it, as an inveterate picture-thinker. The gist is: 'Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what YOU are most passionate for students to learn about. Give your picture a short title. Title your blog post 'Meme: Passion Quilt'[no!]. Link back to this blog entry. Include links to 5 (or more) educators.' It took a very long time to decide on an image, I'd considered this, for a bit (too whimsical) this (too dark), a photograph of a model in a Citroen at the Weissenhof Siedlung (too slick), a photograph of the Bauhaus' young theatre troupe in 1930 (couldn't find it online) and this (I don't think any students would see in it what I wanted them to). So I've settled on, to the cries of 'predictable!' from my enemies:

Hammer & Sickle Architectural Fantasy



This is one of the images in the architectural draughtsman Iakov Chernikhov's book Architectural Fantasies, published in Leningrad in 1933. I've chosen it first, because it's gorgeous; second, because of its political symbolism - an emblem of Communism, depicted with a ferocious, ultra high-tech, bright, tasteless supermodernism. We think of the idea of socialism as something Victorian, something dated and grim, workerist and lumpen - well here it is, as blazingly exciting as anything produced by capital. Third, it makes linear history go haywire - it has resemblances to something off the Richard Rogers drawing board from the mid-80s, or from a particularly inspired deconstructivist studio, but is the product of an essentially peasant country in the early 1930s. It looks like the future, but is ineluctably of the past, a vision of a future that never came into being (it doesn't look anything like the similarly grim eclecticism and standardised modernism that characterised most Stalinist architecture). Fourth, the fearless conception of new space it embodies: it mocks the very idea of 'continuity' in culture. Imagine this slotted into a city, how it would clash and conflict with everything around it. Imagine it extending itself to take in a whole city. And finally, I would ask what these phantasmagoric 'students' thought would be going on inside this place.

Not all of these people are 'educators', but I'm tagging them regardless: Douglas, Charles, Esther, Geoff, Emmy, and Oliver.

We're the Flowers in the Dustbin

The thing most despised about the working class at the moment seems to be that it doesn't do enough bloody work. This is amusing in the UK, where we have (jointly with Canada, apparently) the highest proportion of the able-bodied in work worldwide. This sort of rhetoric has long been knocking around, of course - even in the days when the construction of Telford's iron bridges were notable because deaths of workers were only in single figures, there would have been some twat in Fleet Street moaning about the malingering lower orders. In the last issue of the New Humanist, there was an unpleasant bit of evasive, dissembling decentist drivel from What's It All About Then, Eh, This Thinking Stuff? author Julian Baggini, in defence of Minister for Squalor (ta Scott) Caroline Flint and her supremely Victorian no-job-no-house policy. The eager can read my riposte in the current issue, the first letter of the month honour I've received since I was 13, and hopefully a little more eloquent. At which point I was living in the place depicted in these photographs, a fairly typical interwar 'cottage estate' built by Southampton's local authority. One of the notable things about the Flower Estate, as it's universally known, is how it stops, by its traditionalism, at least one of the usual criticisms of council estates - that their Modernist architecture is some sort of inhuman experiment being tested on the tenants - leaving mainly the snobbery and social Darwinism.



On the same morbid Google search during which I found the images you see here, I also came across a local news story, about what seems to have been a precise, almost paramilitary police manoeuvre ('Operation Order') directed at said Estate, and specifically at the workshy yobs who pervade its pretty roads and and parks, speeding, wearing hoods and being generally ASBO-worthy. The problem here is similar to that raised in Baggini's witterings: this was a grim place, and was made grimmer by several horrible youths, something which I imagine to still be the case. It takes quite a leap, however, to think that this is going to be alleviated by targeting an area like a petty general, or by replacing already underserviced, under-maintained housing with homelessness. The reason I'm linking to this is for the comments at the end of the article, where the good readers of the Echo's website suggest possible other solutions for the Flower Estate and its Untermenschen. These 'pond life' should apparently be alternately sterlised, publicly flogged, or wiped off the face of the earth altogether. This is all said with the studenty joviality usually found on the Chavscum website and its ilk. But they're not really going to do it, are they? Collective punishment, enforced homelessness, stop and search, the occasional shot to the head - these measures couldn't set a precedent for these irreverent little suggestions actually becoming reality?

Back to Nature...

'Krier Speaks!' declares the cover of this week's Architects' Journal. For those reading this who aren't au fait with Luxembourgian monarchist architects, Leon Krier is an ex-assistant of James Stirling, for whom he distinguished himself by odd, surrealistic plans and renderings, and who, partly under the pernicious influence of 70s architecture's cult of Heidegger, dedicated himself first to the attempted rehabilitation of Albert Speer as valiant fighter against Modernism and technological instrumentality (oh yes) and subsequently to Prince Charles' would-be Potemkinstadt, Poundbury. So he's a fascinating, if deeply, deeply dubious figure. Sadly he doesn't quite 'speak' in the AJ (as then someone might be able to argue with him), instead there's excerpts from his portentously titled new book The Architectural Tuning of Settlements.



It's sober stuff, especially compared with what has to be his finest moment, the ludicrous, straightforwardly Fascistic, but morbidly compelling essay 'Vorwarts Kamaraden, Wir Mussen Zuruck', published in the mid-70s for Oppositions. It elicited a rebuttal in the same magazine, but its logic - Nazism and ecological catastrophe as classless phenomena created essentially by technology and the rationalism it engenders, a very Heideggerian position - has stayed the same ever since. So here we have him declaring that all artificial materials - concrete and steel, specifically - should be abandoned in favour of natural stone (where does man-made brick feature here, I wonder?). Points are made with which one could agree - against the private car, for walking - but the ideology underneath is repellent.



Interestingly, Krier implies in the AJ extracts that the architectural wing of the ecological movement is being hijacked by technocrats, who with their 'gadgets' (presumably solar panels and such) are preventing the grand opportunity global warming presents for an Erewhon style rejection of all technology produced since the 15th century, irritatingly getting in the way of the monarchist millennium. A good inadvertent riposte to this can be found in this Fantastic Journal post on the soixante-huitard roots of the High-Tech movement as an attempted reconciliation with nature, something very difficult to find in their recent degeneration into corporate mock-functionalism. There's a bit of a back-history to this too, from the futurist tendencies underlying the garden city (Ebenezer Howard's liking for crystal palaces, Broadacre City, the strange mobile urban-rural Constructivism of Mikhail Okhitovich), up to Drop City, where self-built geodesic domes in the desert offered hideouts from Capital. It has its own dubious elements too, the notion that there is ever an outside, that dropping out can be anything other than a self-congratulatory redoubt for the privileged - but is a timely reminder that technology has to be solution as much as the problem, at least for those of us who would prefer not to return to the 15th century, those of us that have no interest in being at the indifferent mercies of nature.

Gateway

After the bit of a Fall conference that I managed to catch, and which didn't rank as one of my finest moments of public speaking and writing, I had a wander round Manchester for two hours, a city of which I am wholly ignorant. From this brief acquaintance I noted cleanliness, vaguely European hanging around and civic pride & pomp, and many, many luxury flats, often with derelict red brick buildings next to them. So the only thing on which I feel qualified to comment is the fantastic building you see above - Gateway House, a long, curving block leading off Piccadilly station. It's apparently the work of Colonel Seifert, and if so ranks as one of his oddest and best works, certainly a damn sight better than his tossed-off blocks at Euston. It's also comfortingly shabby, and houses a grease-caff where you can get a palatable all-day breakast for 3 quid. You wouldn't be able to do that in Euston.

Sarcasms

Me on the Diaries of Sergei Prokofiev, in what I am told is referred to as the Staggers. (in a brief return of the Plakaty, above is the poster to Lieutenant Kije, a Soviet historical-epic thing which Prokofiev soundtracked)

!

Via

Cleansing and Alchemy

When exactly did 'Regeneration' become the catch-all term for any act of building in a city? The word is perfect, ideologically: it captures first a certain contextualism, a working with what is already there, like the 80s German 'critical reconstruction' (whereas 50s terms like 'comprehensive redevelopment' sounded a bit scary); it sounds vaguely religiose and philanthropic; and like Blairism itself, declares that the bad old days of uncaring capitalism are gone, now we have a warm, considerate neoliberalism. The rise of this term was worth pondering upon finding a little magazine called 'REGENERATION' in the Guardian yesterday.



Produced by Lyonsdown Media Group, known for such publications as Franchising and - of course - Flexible Working, Regeneration is not, unlike say Movello, a straightforward glossy portfolio or catalogue of stunning developments. This one is more concerned, and hence more ideological, its intentions more cleverly phrased. For instance, a column on those PublicPrivatePartnerships argues that local councils should have more power in the schemes (though certainly not build by themselves, good heavens), so you have to search a bit for the giveaway phrase. It comes eventually though: ' the issue is that the right person to move into a property is not necessarily the same as the person who is next in line on the waiting list'. Let's not forget that James Baldwin once dubbed Urban Renewal in US cities as 'Negro Removal'.



Then there are all the cities competing for that all-important Bilbao effect: Swindon, Newport, Newcastle (where 'heritage drives urban regeneration'). Swindon even has its own little new town style corporation, 'The New Swindon Company'. The images all have certain things in common: water, for some reason, obsesses the urban regenerator (a strange compulsion to be in the frontline when the tides start overwhelming the cities?), as does extraneous bits of building like high-tech style bits of scaffold, or pine dressing. All these cities, rising from the ashes of the proletariat and its industries. Like Gordon Brown once did, they claim to have abolished boom and bust, magicked away the cycles of capitalism. 'No longer are our cities vulnerable to the single-industry shocks of the 80s', writes the vice chair of the British Urban Regeneration Association (presumably the service industry will last forever). This is so prevalent that it becomes the telos of every urban intervention - even a brutal urban war.



So, (as Roger mentioned here) we now have 'the logical end result of the Iraq war': an urban regeneration scheme for the Green Zone. A mixed-development, high-end project with accompanying 'regenerator's watercolour' depicting Landmark Architecture. So while at one end of the city there is no electricity, at the other end American chains and Saudi plutocrats are buying up the wasteland to create more gold from shit.

Monuments to Our Enemies, Pt 1

This came up the other day after the anti-BNP demo at City Hall, perhaps I'll make it an irregular series, although the sheer amount of these things might prevent it. This statue is of Jan Smuts, South African politician and white supremacist, and sits on Parliament Square. Unlike many of the other monuments to imperialists, racists and mass murderers dotted round the British capital, the statue was actually the product of a genuinely great sculptor, Jacob Epstein: although it's not exactly his finest moment.